Stretched roughly from Fort Wayne, Indiana in the west, to Sandusky, Ohio on the east, and from the Maumee River valley south to near Findlay, Ohio and North Star, Ohio. Near its southern edge at the southwestern corner of present-day Auglaize County, the swamp was so impervious to travel that wheeled transportation was impossible during most of the year, and local residents thought the rigors of travel to be unsuitable for anyone except adult men. Read the rest of the article on Great Black Swamp on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
A massive quagmire once seeped across the landscape of northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio, where towering oaks and sycamores loomed above murky pools of tannin-stained water—tangled, disorienting, dark. Fifteen hundred square miles of mud and mosquitos from Fort Wayne to Findlay to Toledo. “An absolute terrifying wilderness,” according to a local historian, one that swallowed horses and whole wagons. ... It was the Toledo War of 1835—a quick and bloodless boundary dispute between Ohio and Michigan—that eventually led to the swamp’s demise. On their way to a battle that never happened, the Ohio militia was waylaid by the mire, and the governor took note. The state poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into fixing the Maumee and Western Reserve Road, proving that with enough money, manpower, and ditches, the swamp could be tamed. In 1859, the state passed its first “Ditch Law,” and the people of Northwest Ohio got to work on bleeding the Great Black Swamp dry. Copied from The Death and Life of the Great Black Swamp Draining Ohio’s Great Black Swamp was a feat of human effort and engineering. Restoring it will be even harder. By Ashley Stimpson, published May 27, 2022 on Belt Magazine.com.
New Haven has been ‘old’ for a long time, but you’ve made it historical! The above is a great presentation! I just hope the locals will appreciate it and take care of it! (I’m referring to the art pieces with murals, etc.)
A friend and I paddled our kayaks down the Maumee River a few years ago to near Woodburn. I kept thinking about all the Native Americans that traversed the same waterway over the thousands of years since the last glacial period.
If the landscape that New Haven sits upon could talk, it would have us all spellbound! A geologist from IPFW gave a bus tour of the New Haven community about 35+/- years ago to area school teachers. He explained Lake Maumee and what happened to it when the glacier melted, collapsed, and released immense amounts of water across what is now Ft. Wayne. It flowed toward Huntington and ultimately into the Wabash River Basin. The land which Lake Maumee occupied is today the black, rich farmland that is filling up with new homes and businesses. Highway 37 formed part of the northern boarder of this ancient lake, and local farmers are aware that farmland between Highways 37 and 930 is more productive than land elsewhere. Lake Maumee also covered the Black Swamp in Ohio towards Toledo, where the present Maumee River empties into Lake Erie. Locally the most prominent shoreline in New Haven is seen just north of Highway 930 as you approach it from the north near NHHS, DQ, KFC, and other businesses along the south side of the highway. Central Lutheran and New Haven Middle Schools would have been submerged!
The canal era and the founding of New Haven are recent history compared to the very interesting geological past of this area!
Chapter 1: Maumee River Traverses a Trackless Wilderness on New Haven, Indiana.gov. The land that remained across northeast Indiana, aside from some marshes, was covered with a dense growth of hardwood forests and a lavish variety of tree species. (No other area furnished more valuable timber—oak, walnut, beech, maple, ash, elm, sycamore, poplar, hickory, locust, cherry and others.)
Physiographic soil types will determine what plants were native in Allen County and what will grow under changed conditions. The Great Black Swamp was where the Maumee Lake Plain in pink was the eastern half of Allen County formerly swamp land leaving behind heavy clay soil. Sandy soil is found in counties north of Allen County and more conducive to growing prairie plants that prefer good drainage.
Traveling around Allen County and Northeastern Indiana in the early 19th century was difficult. One of the major reasons was that our portion of the state was at the western edge of the Great Black Swamp, which made roads virtually impassable. One of the solutions was the construction of plank roads. In 1847, the Fort Wayne and Lima Plank Road Company, headed by Samuel Hanna, developed Lima Road into the first plank road in northern Indiana. A plank road is constructed of a series of wooden planks laid next to each other, providing a surface over which wagons could travel in all weather conditions. When it was completed, the Lima Plank Road reached Sturgis, Michigan, a distance of 60 miles. The planks for the road were three inches thick and eight feet long. These pieces of oak are from a plank on the original Lima Plank Road, which went from Fort Wayne to Lima, now Howe, Indiana in LaGrange County. The oak plank was excavated north of LaOtto during road construction. #sociallyhistory
The wetland in the 1820 map of Indiana shown below shows the Great Black Swamp where Fort Wayne and now Allen County are located.
Indiana's environment is profoundly influenced by industrial agriculture. Indiana lost 73% of its original forests and wetlands from 1820 to 2001 to development and agriculture. Industrial #agriculture is the driver.
Industrial agriculture refers to this intensive system of #farming that grows massive amounts of cash crops, also known as monocultures, and confines #livestock animals in crowded conditions. Read more about this issue in our Ag E-news at: https://conta.cc/3CPQl83
The swamp is a part of the current St. Joseph River Watershed Initiative. In 1803 when Ohio became a state, the Maumee Valley area was virtually untouched. It was known only to local Native Americans, and a few trappers and explorers. Development of this corner of Northwest Ohio was delayed nearly 100 years behind other parts of the state due to the Great Black Swamp. Read the rest of the article on The Great Black Swamp originally on IPFW.edu now on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Living in the former Great Black Swamp applies to mundane things like maintaining lawns and gardens shown when the former horticulture educator with the Purdue Cooperative Extension service writes an article Rolling lawn can backfire due to local clay subsoil by Ricky Kemery published April 26, 2022 in The Journal Gazette newspaper. Question: What can you tell me about rolling the lawn? Some people I know say it is bad, and others say they do it every year. Answer: Obsessively and continuously rolling the lawn with a heavy lawn roller on wet heavy clay soils will result in a compacted lawn that will be less healthy as a result. We have a large percentage of clay in soils in our area. This is because our soils are formed from limestone/shale bedrock. Our area was also once a part of a huge lake that covered our area at the time of the glaciers. Many parts of northern Indiana were once poorly drained swamps that were eventually drained for farming use.
WBGU Dumentaries The Story of the Great Black Swamp
Special | 54m 8sVideo has Closed Captions | CC A documentary about the area located in Northwest Ohio, known as the Great Black Swamp.
02/02/2010 | Rating NR
Great Lakes Now Great Black Swamp
Clip: Season 1 Episode 7 | 8m 15sVideo has Closed Captions | CC
The roots of Lake Erie’s perennial harmful algal blooms go back more than a century.
10/28/2019
Broad and High A Culinary History of the Great Black Swamp
Clip: Season 2 Episode 18 | 4m 7s
Nathan Crook is a cultural anthropologist and instructor at The Ohio State University agricultural campus in Wooster who researches culinary history and traditions in the Midwest and Ohio. In his recent book, A Culinary History of the Great Black Swamp, Crook explores the once uninhabitable and densely forested wetland region of northwest Ohio known as the Great Black Swamp.
07/15/2015 | Rating NR
The Great Black Swamp was once a massive network of wild swamps, forests, and wetlands on the Northwestern Ohio frontier. The swamp delayed white settlement for decades, bringing death and ruin to thousands of Native Americans and white settlers alike.
Have you ever wondered about the wide-scale draining of wetlands that took place in 18th and 19th century America? If so, you're in luck! Read all about it in our latest blog post, "Draining America."
Pivoting to the Midwest, the map below of Ohio and Indiana from 1819 depicts many of the river systems in which large wetlands were situated. The Great Black Swamp was a large wetland in a small part of northeast Indiana and a significant part of northwest Ohio, draining through the Maumee River into Lake Erie. The Grand Kankakee Marsh in Indiana and Illinois, situated on the map along the Kankakee River just South of Lake Michigan, was once one of the largest wetlands in the United States.
An August 17, 2017 post by the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana on Facebook showed a post by Maumee Watershed Alliance stating: Did you know that our area was once part of what was known as the Great Black Swamp? Read the story to learn more!. The article appears to no longer be available without an account, but the post generated several interesting comments:
My book group just read At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier. It is a novel and the first part of the book deals with a families struggle to settle in the Black Swamp. Even though it is a novel it was compelling reading and the facts of the arduous journey to get there, loss of life to disease and hard farming...
I grew up in Wood County. Definitely part of the Black Swamp region. No basements in my home town! Small cellars were about it.
My Great-Great-Grandparents crossed the Great Black Swamp in 1837, coming from near Sandusky to Adams County, Indiana. I've always wondered about the route they took.
Long, long time ago a huge swamp called the Great Black Swamp stretched from around the Port Clinton (Ohio) area to...
Long, long time ago a huge swamp called the Great Black Swamp stretched from around the Port Clinton (Ohio) area to Fort Wayne (Indiana). The swamp was an impediment to settlement in that part of Ohio and northeastern Indiana. According to early surveyors of Wabash County there were a number of tracts that were quite low which they called “swamp lands”. In Chester Township they were called by locals the “Bear Swamp.” Today’s picture shows an area that still remains of the “Bear Swamp.” A If you check the 1875 Historical Atlas of Wabash County you can see the swampy areas. For the most part the swamps have been drained, beginning in the middle of the 19th Century, and the area used as farmland. But, occasionally you can see the small remnants of them. You may have driven past this swampy area located on the Laketon road about one mile north of Ind. 16.
The swampy, marshy land often led to difficulties for early settlers who were caught away from home at night. On many a night a thick blanket of fog would obscure the swampy areas. Also, around the swampy areas tall grass called “Sage Grass” grew up to ten feet tall obscuring trails and marshes. Cows were often let out to graze during the day and most of the time they found there way home but occasionally they became disoriented in the tall grass. Those sent out to look for them often became lost and spent hours finding their way home. Also the swamp lands were home to a variety of dangerous animals including wolves. Some settlers who had a family member lost in such a manner would beat on a barrel until they returned. One night a young girl named Anna M. Geik, became lost while hunting cows and spent the entire night up a tree that she was able to find. She spent the dreary night among its branches, with what seemed like ten thousand wolves howling and raving under her. They gnawed the bark from the tree, close to the ground, and tore up the earth for some distance all around it. The fright and exposure of the frosty night proved too great a shock for her constitution, and she died a few weeks afterward.”
Industrial agriculture refers to this intensive system of 
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